Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Albanese Labor Government to end its anti-farming agenda, which is damaging Australia's competitive advantages, driving up the cost of doing business for Australian farmers and further increasing the cost of living for all Australians.

I move this motion in the Australian Senate today because it is today that the Australian farming public—and I see many people in the gallery from Western Australia and beyond—have had enough of a Labor Party that does not care about the future sustainability, prosperity or security of their present business or, indeed, their intergenerational operations.

We have had thousands of farmers from right across this great wide brown land here on the front steps of parliament. Did the Prime Minister bother to come out of this ivory tower onto the front lawns and face the accusers? No. He gave the President of the NFF a bit of a shellacking, and might have used choice words that aren't very parliamentary, but the Prime Minister refused to meet the thousands of people who gathered this morning. The Minister for Agriculture—cooee!—couldn't be found either. Nor did she bother to go over to Western Australia to actually face a state that is on the front line of this government's anti-farming agenda.

The live sheep trade out of Western Australia is a trade that is celebrated, is a key system in primary production in the west and provides culturally appropriate protein to the Middle East. Never mind that it is world leading in animal husbandry and that it underpins thousands of jobs in the west; this Labor government and this Prime Minister were prepared to trade the livelihoods of these Western Australian primary producers for a few cheap seats in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. Dirty deals done dirt cheap, and who pays? The Australian farming family.

It wasn't just those that support the Keep the Sheep campaign. There were irrigators from the Murray-Darling Basin who have seen this government decimate their future by removing the socioeconomic test that was required before a government would remove additional water from these farmers. What's Tanya Plibersek done? She's just said: 'We're taking it anyway. We don't care about the science. We don't care about how healthy the Murray River is. We don't care about how many suicides this will cause in the Murray-Darling Basin. We're taking the water anyway'. Any farmer worth their salt, any of us nine million Australians who don't live in capital cities, knows that if you remove water you remove wealth from these communities.

The cattle industry, the NTCA, was in town. We know that it is sheep first and it is the cattle industry next, and I know my colleague and cattlewoman herself Senator Susie McDonald will have more to say on that later in this debate. This government let their mask slip when we had the Rural and Regional Women's Award in this very building a couple of weeks ago. The Prime Minister almost choked on his beautiful Australian beef! He wanted to swallow his words instead of swallowing that fabulous product when he let it slip that he is coming for the live cattle trade next. The NTCA were also out there. But it is not just our primary producers who are under attack by this government; it's our trucking industries and the whole supply chain that underpins them and our regional communities. This government doesn't care. They think we're out of sight, out of mind, and today, we made our voice heard.

I was very proud, as a National Party leader in this Senate chamber and as a rural and regional woman myself, to stand next to the National Party's candidate for the new seat of Bullwinkel in the west, Mia Davies, a woman who comes from primary production stock. She's been the Leader of the Opposition in Western Australia. She's experienced, passionate and serious about standing up for the west here in this place. It's about time Western Australians had someone in the House of Representatives that is prepared to back them in a way that Prime Minister Albanese and his government haven't.